Cases
Lemelson v. SEC
CASE SUMMARY
NCLA challenges the Securities and Exchange Commission’s illegitimate “follow-on” enforcement proceeding against Rev. Fr. Emmanuel Lemelson, an ordained Greek Orthodox priest and activist investor. A Massachusetts federal jury in 2021 rejected nearly all of SEC’s baseless charges against Fr. Lemelson, including all its incendiary allegations that he engaged in a scheme to defraud the market and even his own fund investors. Yet, SEC now threatens to bar or suspend him from the securities industry using its own “follow-on” administrative proceeding, in which SEC has appointed itself as the judge and jury. This “caricature of structural adjudicative bias” must be declared unlawful and stopped.
A bedrock foundation of due process is a fair trial in a fair tribunal. That should mean the adjudicator cannot decide its own case, especially against a longstanding nemesis it has already prosecuted in a parallel court case and demonized in demonstrably false press releases. Having failed even to ask the federal court to bar or suspend Fr. Lemelson from the securities industry—much less convince the court to do so—SEC has now appointed itself judge and jury in its own administrative “follow-on” adjudication to achieve that objective unilaterally. This violates not only Fr. Lemelson’s Fifth Amendment right to due process of law in an Article III court, but also his Seventh Amendment right to a trial by jury.
SEC’s inherently biased follow-on proceeding against Fr. Lemelson is far from unique. SEC has prosecuted hundreds of similar follow-on cases in recent decades. Unsurprisingly, according to academic research, SEC has ruled in its own favor in every single follow-on case. It is long past time to end this mockery of justice.
